A horse had to be rescued by firefighters after becoming stuck in a farm gate for more than two hours.

The New Forest gelding had tried to jump a galvanised farm gate in the West End area and its hind rear leg caught in the top rail.

The horse was given a sedative by a vet and a crane was used to support it as firefighters cut it free.

The horse was then released by a specialist animal rescue adviser employed by the rescue services.

Anton Philips, the fire service’s watch manager, said: “With the nice weather we are getting called to more and more incidents where animals have become trapped in some way.

“Now that Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service has a team of animal rescue advisors we are able to immediately respond.

“It’s really important that owners alert us as soon as possible and are also on hand to keep their pet or animal calm.

“The owner did a good job in working with us to keep horse calm and to feed it lots of hay, which is a natural sedative.”

Friday was a very lucky day for Pedro, a 2-year-old black and white Havanese dog that had been missing for two weeks.

Although a little disheveled, many ticks and a limping hind leg the little critter greeted his family with a wagging body and kisses.

The New York City canine had accompanied its owner Jeanne Meister to Brighton Gardens, an assisted-living facility, to visit her father who is a resident there.

During the course of the visit Pedro managed to escape when the room he was in was entered.

Despite a large search committee immediately following his escape the little critter eluded its rescueres for quite sometime.

While the little dog had been seen a number of times on the Woodbridge Country Club grounds, there had been no recent sightings.

However, on Friday, when Assistant Golf Course Supervisor Jay Martin was assessing course conditions he heard the faint sounds of whimpering and yelps for help.

When he located the little guy in a remote corner of the golf course there was Pedro entrenched in some pricker bushes.

He was so entrenched, Martin said, that he had to use loppers to free the little dog.

Before freeing the animal Martin contacted Animal Control who immediately came to his assistance.

“We were starting to give up hope. It had been two weeks,” Meister said when she learned her dog had been rescued.

She and her husband Robert immediately left New York City to be reunited with their canine companion.

Barbara Camillo, Brighton Gardens community relations was also elated.

“We are very happy. We couldn’t be happier. We were very pleased to see he was found unharmed. The whole staff was elated. It picked us up,” Camillo said.

Jason Booth grounds supervisor at Woodbridge Country Club said he and his staff had been keeping their eyes open for Pedro.

In fact, at an earlier Pedro sighting, Booth headed off a fox that was chasing Pedro.

Both Martin and Booth said that the prickers had allowed them to catch the elusive canine as he was very fast and would run away whenever he was sighted.

During the past two weeks, with the publicity from The Bulletin the Meisters, Animal Control and Brighton Gardens had all received calls reporting Pedro sightings and inquiries of his status and good luck.

The Meisters had made numerous trips back to locations where Pedro had been sighted. Spending hours walking the golf course calling for the little creature.

Animal Control Officers Judy Umstead and Jamie Esser spent numerous hours the past couple of weeks looking for the little guy, leaving food and setting traps.

“This made our day, our week, ” they said smiling from ear to ear during the reunion.

“This was truly a group effort by a lot of people and we are truly grateful,” Jeanne Meister said.

The capercaillie – one of the UK’s rarest birds – may be on the verge of a recovery.

The RSPB believes last year’s breeding season for the birds was the best for 15 years and says the population may even be expanding in some areas.

There are currently only 1,000 breeding pairs of capercaillie in the UK, all of them in Scotland, compared with more than 20,000 pairs 30 years ago.

The RSPB said the figures showed work to save the species was paying off.

With the capercaillie nearing extinction in Britain, there has been a lot of work done to improve habitats and remove deer fencing, with which the low-flying, turkey-sized birds collide.

The wildlife charity said there were no grounds for complacency, however, as the capercaillie remained on the endangered list.

Dubai: A large nesting colony of Bank Myna, a variety of the common Myna or Pied Starling, has been spotted off Al Warsan. It is known as one of the largest breeding grounds of the bird in the country.

“The nests were spotted in a desert area, off the Dubai Municipality’s Sewage Treatment Plant in Al Warsan,” said Dr Reza Khan, head of Dubai Zoo. He said Myna is a resident bird of the Subcontinent.

Dr Khan said the bird was introduced to the UAE by some specimens that escaped from pet shops and bird owners in the late 1980s and early 1990s when visitors from India brought cages full of exotic birds.

The Al Warsan nests are far bigger than those he noticed in a residential building near Al Wasl in late 1990s.

For 18-year-old Darah Gerou, it’s a matter of pride.

Gerou, who uses a wheelchair, has worked for months to make her senior project at Poway High School the most awesome one in her class.

So determined is she to prove to classmates – and perhaps herself – that her cerebral palsy will never slow her down, Gerou doggedly built a major fundraising program that culminates tomorrow at the Country Health and Home Street Fair in Poway. She expects to raise more than $8,000 for charity.

“She decided that if she had to have a senior project, she was going to . . . have the best senior project of all,” said her mother, Susan Miles.

Gerou’s smile widened as big as a sunrise at her mother’s praise.

Gerou decided to go for the big score, she said, when she heard Poway’s principal, Scott Fisher, talk about senior projects.

“Mr. Fisher said it had to be something you feel passionate about. It had to be the kind of thing you wanted to get up early on Saturday morning to do,” Gerou said.

What’s her passion? Animals. She had raised prize 4-H goats, kept a horse and now has five dogs, all named for U.S. presidents and their first ladies – including her beloved basset hound, Abraham Lincoln.

Waddling Abe inspired her to call Jerri Caswell, who runs the San Diego chapter of Basset Hound Rescue, a nonprofit group. For 16 years Caswell’s organization has been nursing back to health more than 1,000 abandoned and abused hounds, and offering them for adoption to homes that meet the group’s strict standards.

Caswell told Gerou about the problems bassets face: Many are in-bred by greedy breeders or callous dog owners who dump their pets when they move or go on vacation.

The sad stories she heard got Gerou moving. For the past school year, she called and wrote more than 120 local businesses soliciting donations. She then organized their contributions into gift baskets, which she has been raffling off.

More than 80 percent of the businesses she contacted agreed to contribute.

“It’s surprising how willing everybody was to give,” she said. “I’ve lived here 10 years and I didn’t know some of these businesses existed. Now I know all these people and have built relationships with the business community. Isn’t that what it was supposed to be about, a learning experience?”

Her family helped her build a Web site to further market her fundraiser which features the hundreds of prizes available.

Donor prizes include a $100 dinner coupon for the restaurant Rainwater’s on Kettner in downtown San Diego, goodies from Bon Bon Bakery & Chocolates in the Bernardo Winery and a year’s worth of free dog food worth $500 from Casey’s Petropolis.

When she called the Poway Chamber of Commerce to talk to them about what she was doing, the group gave her a booth, she said, knowing that it’s hard for business organizations to turn down dog-loving teenagers.

A CAT which survived for seven weeks trapped beneath a kitchen cabinet after its owners moved house has been reunited with the family.

Lucky 14-year-old Lucy, had been left behind when the Duke family moved from Stone, near Dartford in Kent to the Highland Capital.

Unbeknown to the Dukes, or the new owner of their former house, Lucy had become trapped but survived without food and apparently, no water.

Fortunately, she was discovered just in time and, having been nursed back to health, finally made it up to the Highlands to be reunited with her relieved owners at their new home in Westhill — three months after the move and at an additional cost of more than £1000.

Geoff Duke, who works for an Inverness medical firm, loaded up the removal truck before he and his wife, Debbie, and their children, Bradley (13) and Melissa (18 months) stayed in a hotel the night before catching the plane from Heathrow to Inverness. They had arranged to pick up the cat from the house en route to the airport.

“Morning came, the taxi was in the driveway with its engine running,” Mr Duke recalled. “We all hunted high and low but the cat could be found nowhere in the house.”

They assumed that the cat had escaped when the enthusiastic new owner started stripping walls with a sander the previous afternoon.

“The cat was clearly missing,” Mr Duke said. “Having made a very hard but obvious decision to continue to the airport, the upset and stress on the journey to Heathrow was almost unbearable.”

Their old neighbours took up the search, fixing posters to lamp-posts virtually all the way to the M25 and details were entered on “lost cat” websites.

“Several weeks went by, life went on, and we became resigned to the fact that we would never see Lucy again,” Mr Duke said.

But almost seven weeks after moving to Inverness, they received a message that Lucy had been found. She had been living under the plinth below the kitchen cabinets.

Subsequently, Lucy was taken to a local vet who initially thought the cat was dead on arrival but, after being put on a drip, she responded well to treatment.

“We were told that for the cat to survive after this time she must have an incredible will to live,” Mr Duke said.

“How the cat had survived with no food was a miracle in itself but, dehydrated though she clearly was, how she survived with no water at all, or where she was getting water from was a big mystery that we shall never know the answer to.”

Their previous neighbours looked after Lucy until she was certified fit to travel by the vet. Mr Duke flew down to collect her and then brought her back on a flight from Heathrow, seemingly unaffected by her ordeal.

The cost of Lucy’s disappearance included more than £600 in vet’s bills and the air fares.

“It is one of those things,” Mr Duke reflected philosophically. “She deserved it, given she could survive all that time and had shown an incredible will to live.”